A story to keep secret
by Izumi1909
Summary: [AU] Investigating a twenty year old double missing person case brings Sigrun, Mikkel and Emil to a family of reclusive Finns in Saimaa's outskirts.
1. The mysterious Hotakainen family

**The mysterious Hotakainen family**

-I don't get it. If these Hotakainen people are abducting anyone who comes near their island, why don't you just stop buying their stuff and selling things to them?  
The Finnish shopkeeper gave Emil a resigned look:  
-It is illegal to do anything like this based on suspicion alone. A few investigators and mages were brought in over the years, and none of them have found any kind of incriminating evidence. Onni knows it, and I suspect he's quite harsh towards the kid if he returns without something he was asked to buy or obviously got cheated during a sale or a purchase. The weapon merchant's daughter refused to do business with him once. His response was to throw a length of his family's wool cloth on one of the displays, grab a box of ammo and run away with it. She couldn't go after him for theft because the cloth he threw on the display was enough to pay for the box. But if you don't pull that kind of trick, that kid is the easiest customer ever. He doesn't even try to haggle. If the price is much higher or much lower than last time, he asks the reason so he can tell it to Onni. And since the kid looks really scared of him, nobody wants Onni to show up and have to explain themselves to him directly.  
-Has anyone actually seen this Onni? And does "the kid" have a name?  
-Onni was already six when the family started acting strange. Before that, his parents had taken him to the market a few times, so some of us knew his face. But the kid isn't as keen on disclosing his name as he was, so we keep calling him that despite the fact that he's getting kind of old for it.

The shopkeeper had already given Emil the whole story about the Hotakainen family "acting strange". The grandmother had given birth to twin boys of an unknown father in her youth. While her sons were growing up, she had made herself quite the reputation as a magical healer. Twenty-one years ago, little after the second of the twins had gotten married, all members of the family, except for the grandmother, had stopped coming to the market from one week to the next. Thirteen years ago, the grandmother had started coming with "the kid", who had been six at the time. Eleven years ago, one evening, smoke had come from the small island on which the family was living with no neighbors. Some kind of magic barrier had kept anyone from getting close to their farmstead. By the next morning, whatever had been happening had been taken care of. "The kid" had come to the market, alone. The house catching fire and said fire having been put out of had been the only information he had offered spontaneously. Everything else, including the death toll, people had had to goad out of him by asking him direct and specific questions. There had been many questions he had just plain refused to answer, claiming people didn't need to know. He next asked to buy supplies to help repair the buildings and rebuild the family's flock of sheep. After that, he became the only member of the family to ever come to the market, like his grandmother before him. The merchants, however, had noticed something odd from talking to each other. From what they had figured out, "the kid" was the only child of the second twin to get married. His aunt, Onni's mother, had been starting to show a baby bump before stopping to come to the market, lining up with the fact that he had mentioned having a slightly older female cousin. The death toll of the night the fire had happened had consisted of the grandmother and both sets of parents. However, each time an item had a "one per person living in the home" purchase recommendation, "the kid" always got _four_. The first time it happened, the merchant selling the item had asked if there was a fourth still-living family member that they didn't know about, only to get the confirmation that they family now consisted only of himself, Onni, and Onni's younger sister. All the other times, "the kid" had remained mute when asked who he needed the fourth item for. There were a bunch of theories about who that fourth person was. Emil asking why nobody had simply gone to the island to find out for themselves had been what had prompted the shopkeeper to tell him about the family's possible abduction of people getting too close to their home. One of the theories about that fourth person was that it was never the _same_ fourth person for very long.

The shopkeeper spoke again:  
-I've heard stories about you and your two friends. I'm more than willing to believe those that claim that the three of you actually treasure your lives, and that you consider your real job to find some kind of nice story to tell Icelanders who refuse to believe how hard things are outside of their allegedly god-blessed country. If I were you, I'd choose now to stop pretending to be looking for people who were probably eaten by trolls or beasts twenty years ago. Pity that they were expecting a baby, but such things are of no importance to hungry monsters looking for their next meal.  
Emil couldn't help pointing out the flaw in the man's reasoning:  
-Excuse me, but the people we're looking for weren't immune and the woman's pregnancy was crippling her so much that they weren't able going to be able to go back to Iceland before she had the baby. Why in the world would they go anywhere outside a safe area on their own?  
-And why in the world would someone wait twenty damn years to hire someone to investigate their disappearance?  
-Their foster children couldn't afford it at the time, and a few snags in each of their lives kept them from saving much money. The oldest brother got a promotion to captain a few months ago, and they were finally able to save enough money between them.  
-Given this family's likely activities, it's still best that the three of you leave as soon as possible. They tend to prefer people from out of town for some reason, so they may end up making the three of you come to them even if you decide against going to see them on your own.  
Emil had to resign himself:  
-An entire family isolating themselves on their own island for two decades, rumors that people getting to close to it disappear… Sigrun is _definitely_ going to want to check the place out, now.  
Before he could offer an explanation to the shopkeeper's inquisitive look, Emil noticed Kitty was nibbling at some of the smoked fish on display. He quickly purchased the piece, claimed that the others were waiting for him, grabbed Kitty, and ran. He could already hear Sigrun making a jab about how they were going to be dining on the cat's leftovers yet again. At least, this time, Kitty hadn't picked an expensive fish, of which the shopkeeper couldn't cut a smaller, more affordable piece without noticing the missing chunk.

Up to a couple years ago, Sigrun and Mikkel had _actually_ been swindlers of sorts. Some Icelanders just plain refused to believe that their travelling loved ones had most likely been eaten by trolls or beasts, and were willing to pay a lot of money to find out what had "really" happened. Sigrun and Mikkel offered their "services" to those among them who wouldn't or couldn't leave their home for one reason or another. To make it look like they actually did what they had been paid for, they would actually travel to the last place the missing person had most likely been and exchange a few words with locals who could have seen them at the time. They did have a few rules, however. One was that they never knowingly swindled anyone into poverty. Another was to be good guests wherever they ended up being sent, and offer their help if it turned out to be needed. That gave them a good reputation and kept customers coming. A couple years ago, the "missing" person had turned out to be alive and well, having decided to settle in their travel destination. The loss of contact had been entirely due to lousy handwriting and a backcountry postal worker reading it incorrectly, resulting in the letters to the sender's family in Iceland piling up in a basket somewhere quite far away from their actual destination. That occurrence had made the news all over the Known World, and caught a then-seventeen Emil's attention. He hadn't been the only one to want join Sigrun and Mikkel in their ventures. He had stood out by keeping up with enough of the "trials" that Sigrun had set up to scare the applicants away that she and Mikkel had decided that the only way to get rid of him would be to take him with them on an actual job. Then that if the first one hadn't done the trick, the second probably would. After the third had ended, he'd been offered an actual contract. Before he actually signed, they admitted that those three jobs had been the first that they had seriously investigated. Finding a still-living person where they had expected to find yet another imprudent grossling victim had been rewarding in ways they hadn't expected. They now wanted to actually find out all they could about the missing people for themselves, and not just their clients. And if it did turn out to be yet another grossling victim, it would at least give them the material to make the story they told their client better than it would have been before their first successful job.

Emil came back to Sigrun and Mikkel as they were setting up camp, and asked them what they had found out. Mikkel could speak Finnish, but Sigrun couldn't, so they had parted ways to be able to speak to more people. Mikkel had heard of the Hotakainen family from the very woman who had been running the boarding house in which the couple they were looking for had stayed twenty years ago. According to her, for the first ten years of the Hotakainen family's isolation, her guests would disappear quite regularly. The couple the three of them were looking for may have even been the first to be subject to the phenomenon. They would go out for a walk and not come back. But those disappearances had stopped after the fire on the Hotakainen's island. Little after the fire, signs asking people to not disembark had been set up on the island. People now avoided the island part out of respect for the signs, part because warning shots had actually been fired to people disregarding them, part because of the strange disappearances that had actually happened before the fire.  
-Then that's settled, we're going there tomorrow morning.  
Neither Mikkel nor Emil had to actually utter the word "what?". Giving Sigrun the usual look sufficed.  
-Everything points to those kids not actually wanting to harm anyone. Meanwhile, we're looking for people who disappeared right around the time members of that family may or may not have been abducting people. We make sure they understand we're not with the army, we tell them the names, we show them the photo, and if they really seem to have no idea who we're talking about, we leave. Simple.  
As usual, Mikkel pointed out the obvious:  
-Provided that we actually get to the point where we can have a formal discussion with them, what do you plan on doing if they give any sign of knowing something but refusing to share it with us? Our purpose is to find out what happened to missing people, and good story to bring back if we can't. Not to become missing people ourselves.  
Sigrun waved her hand in Mikkel's general direction:  
-We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. The first step will be to see if it's actually possible to stay on that island more than a few minutes without getting shot to death. Better brush up on those talking skills, you two.  
That sounded like a good idea. Some of the merchants Emil had spoken to had used words whose meanings he could only guess, so he decided to pull his Swedish-Finnish dictionary out to make sure he had guessed correctly and avoid any future embarrassment. After looking through his stuff twice, and emptying the contents of both his bags, he had to admit defeat: he had actually managed to forget the dictionary in Reykjavik. He remembered seeing a bookseller at the market, and the market's hours at its entrance. If he hurried, he could get there before it closed.

The bookseller turned out to still be open, and to have a cheap Finnish-Swedish dictionary. Considering they were not exactly in the central part of Saimaa, Emil decided to not be too picky. Right after he took his money, the bookseller addressed a young man around Emil's age who had started looking at the merchandise during the transaction:  
-Ah, it's been a while. How much do you have left over this time?  
The new customer was a young man with grey-blue eyes and ash-blonde chin-length hair, a little taller than Emil himself, but much thinner and with sharper angles in his facial features. He was wearing a white long-sleeved hooded sweater, pants of the same color, and light brown gloves that happened to match the shirt he was wearing under his sweater. He handed a length of undyed wool cloth to the bookseller, who examined it before picking up a handful of smaller books and inviting him to pick one. Emil noticed one of the books seemed to be the Icelandic equivalent of the dictionary he had just purchased for himself. It ended up being the one chosen by the thin young man, which Emil found kind of odd. A language-to-language dictionary wasn't exactly something one brought on a whim with spare bartering currency as far as he knew. Emil and the bookseller were apparently like-minded:  
-It may be a good idea that you pick something else. I only really put that one in here for the sake of actually showing you everything you can buy. If that family of yours won't even leave their island, it's quite unlikely that any of you will ever run into someone who speaks Icelandic.


	2. Family secrets

**Family secrets**

As Lalli was about to return to the small boat he had taken to the market with the day's supplies, a short gold-haired man speaking strangely came to talk to him:  
-Hi. You're the guy from the Hotakainen family, right?  
Lalli didn't stop walking, hoping to get rid of him. People who went out of their way to talk to him meant trouble he couldn't deal with, more often than not.  
-My friends and I are looking for two people who went missing twenty years ago.  
Lalli had an easy answer at hand, for once:  
-I'm only nineteen.  
-I know, but we… want to talk to absolutely everyone who could have seen them, even if they were children at the time. I heard you have a cousin who's a little older than you.  
He was about to tell him that Onni hadn't been to the market in twenty-one years in case whoever had told him about Onni's existence hadn't, when he realized who the man was looking for. Onni said that he wasn't supposed to talk about _those_ people while he wasn't on their home island, otherwise the army would come and take all four of them away. After what grandma had did to them, Onni, Tuuri and the sheepherder couldn't leave the island without being a danger to those around them. Grandma had nonetheless discovered something that couldn't go forgotten, but was more dangerous than helpful on its own. However, combined with another discovery humanity was well-known to seek, it could potentially save lives. For this reason, they had to continue living, guarding the secret. A handful of mages had found out about their situation over the years and promised to tell them if they heard anything about the other necessary discovery being made, in addition to keeping their secret in the meantime. Each of them had also made sure that both local authorities and whichever outside authority had sent them knew that simply leaving them alone and letting them choose who could and could not disembark on their island was the best course of action for everyone. His boat was now in sight and he had been walking while thinking of his answer, so he had probably lost the gold-haired man. He stopped next to the boat, and decided to catch his breath for a few moments before loading the supplies.  
-Murderer!  
Lalli sensed the stone about to be thrown at him, and did his best to dodge it.  
-Hey, what do you think you're doing?  
Lalli turned his head, only for his eyes to meet the gold-haired man's back. The younger teen who had thrown the stone ran away, and the gold-haired man turned as to face Lalli:  
-Are you okay?  
-Yes?  
The gold-haired man started ruffling his hair:  
-I know it's not exactly the right time for this, but I just remembered the names of the people my friends and I are looking for. Could you at least ask your cousin if the names Árni Ragnarsson and Sigríður Jónsdóttir mean anything to him? What the…  
Lalli and the gold-haired man noticed the red that had joined the gold at the same time. The stone intended for Lalli had landed on the side of his head, apparently. Without really thinking, Lalli touched the wound so he could help it heal with magic. This man had nice eyes, he thought. Blue, but less grey than those of most other people he ran into at the market.  
-Uh… thanks?  
Lalli suddenly realized he was touching him much longer then what was necessary to cast the healing spell, removed his hand, finished loading the supplies, and left without a single word.

Lalli usually hated it when that specific argument between Onni and Tuuri resurfaced, but this time, it let him check the sole remaining book that contained the names of any of _those_ people without anyone else noticing. He found the names the gold-haired man had told him, quite close to the beginning. If they were in there, that meant the people bearing them had died as some of grandma's experimental subjects. He'd done this to satisfy his own curiosity. According to Onni's rules, he wasn't supposed to speak about those people while he was off the island anyway. He closed the book, put it back in the usual place, and re-arranged his tableware, having moved it aside to be able to lay the book flat on the table. Just as he had put his plate back in the right place, the book he had brought back from the market was slapped on it by Onni's hand:  
-Keep this with you until next time you go to the market, and trade it for something _you_ actually want.  
There it was again. Onni wanted to thank him for all the work he was doing. Since the labor of Onni, Tuuri and the sheepherder was now turning up a small, but regular profit, they could afford a "treat" from time to time. Because of how much the three of them depended on Lalli going to the market on a regular basis, Onni had decided that Lalli should get to choose a "treat" for himself. According to Onni, a "treat" was something you brought to make yourself happy, not because you needed it. Lalli had never seen something that could be a "treat" for him at the market, despite Onni's conviction that all he needed to do was look a little harder. Meanwhile, Tuuri kept wanting more numerous and interesting books in the house. When Lalli brought books back home, she was happy, which, in turn, made Lalli happy. In principle, it was the perfect solution. In reality, because of the way both Tuuri and Lalli were, Onni assumed that Tuuri was convincing Lalli buy what she wanted, and refused to believe both of them when they told the truth, for different reasons. Lalli was paralyzed by Onni's gesture, with no idea what to do.

He got solace from the very person he usually saw as a disturbance as a hand removed the book from his plate and replaced it with a serving of food:  
-Hey, what's that?  
Tuuri answered:  
-A Finnish-Icelandic dictionary that Onni doesn't want me to keep because he's persuaded that I forced Lalli to buy it for me.  
The sheepherder immediately reminded Lalli of the reason he couldn't stand him:  
-What's the difference with the dictionary we already have?  
It was in the thing's name, idiot. Tuuri ended up being the one stating the obvious:  
-It shows the words in Finnish side by side with the word in Icelandic.  
The sheepherder opened the book, stared at the contents for a few moments, and closed it:  
-Can I keep it?  
If the sheepherder kept the book, it might as well be given back to Tuuri. But Onni also wanted to avoid doing anything that would make him feel mistreated, and because of this tended to credit him with much more ability to make his own choices than he actually had. That was how Onni ended up acting as if Lalli was less able to make decisions for himself than the young man who had been grandma's hidden ward up to the day of the fire. Even today, the sheepherder was the only one among the household's day-workers either willing or able to do certain tasks due to having been less damaged by grandma's experiments than Onni and Tuuri. Onni sighed:  
-Fine, you can keep it. Now let's eat before dinner gets cold.  
Onni came to sit next to Lalli, while the sheepherder and Tuuri sat next to each other at the other side of the table. Between bites, Tuuri started complaining to the one who was technically her husband about how Lalli never paid attention to what books he brought back and that the fact that it was never what she would have picked herself should be proof enough that getting the books had been Lalli's choice and not hers. Onni pointed out she had recently taken sudden interest in a book about Iceland that had belonged to their parents, so he refused to believe the Finnish-Icelandic dictionary to be a coincidence. It was the sheepherder's turn to be the less idiotic of the three others:  
-Or maybe Lalli noticed she had been reading that book and picked the dictionary when the bookseller told him he had enough cloth to buy it.  
 _Finally_ someone had figured that out. How had it taken so long?

Emil finally found a good arrangement for the scarf tied around his head. Magic healing or not, Mikkel had insisted on cutting the hair growing in the wound's vicinity, leaving a whole side of his head a mess that he was now trying to conceal. Mikkel was currently attempting to get Sigrun to back out of her plan, accounting both for the fact that Emil had possibly found another, less invasive way of finding out what the family knew and the fact that they could be dealing with up to three mages. Sigrun wouldn't hear any of it:  
-He found a more peaceful way to _ask the question_. That will be worthless if we don't get the answer. If they have anything to tell us, I don't think they'll want to risk anyone else overhearing, so they may be more talkative if we come to them. We're still going there first thing in the morning.  
Emil sighed, and hoped that taking the stone for the guy would earn him some kind of favor before he got a bullet in some part of his body for trespassing.

Lalli finished wrapping Onni's bandages and put the soiled ones in the cleaning basin. He glanced in the direction of the two-person bed in the other room, where the sheepherder was caring for Tuuri's bandages. She didn't always put her sleeping shirt on right away after this. On that subject, she and the sheepherder weren't losing their time in getting _that_ started tonight. Or, as Onni called it, "As long as they don't do anything that risks producing a child". It was time for Lalli to start his nocturnal scouting round. He left the house, then the farmland, all while thinking of what had happened with the gold-haired man. The day after he had decided that going ahead with marrying Tuuri and the sheepherder to each other was the right way to deal with what the had been up to, Onni had asked Lalli if he'd ever seen someone at the market with whom he wanted to do _that_. At the time, Lalli had honestly answered that he hadn't. But that had been four, maybe five years ago. Since then, he had been more or less able to identify what Onni had been talking about. There was just one detail that kept things from completely fitting: the people stirring up that feeling had all been men. While Onni hadn't specifically asked if Lalli had been attracted to _women_ that day, he had also admitted to having had no second thoughts in marrying Tuuri and the sheepherder in part because they didn't "have any kind of option besides each other anyway". For Tuuri, that had definitely been true. But the sheepherder would have technically had other options if it was okay for two people of same sex to do _that_ as long as they weren't closely related. But Onni could have also meant it in a sense that the sheepherder hadn't shown any kind of interest in him or Lalli, meaning that he liked women. Lalli hesitated to ask Onni for a clarification on what he had meant that day. Onni kept claiming that various part of Lalli's behavior wouldn't "sit well" with "most people". Lalli had figured out long ago that if it weren't for how dependent the others were on him regularly going to the market, his behavior probably wouldn't be "sitting well" with Onni either. If liking men that way turned out to be something that "didn't sit well with most people", it would only make things worse.

xxxx

The sun was coming up, and it was soon time to go join the others for breakfast before going to sleep. As he came close to the island's small harbor, Lalli noticed there was already a boat out near the larger island on which the market was usually held. As he walked by, he noticed that the boat seemed to be heading in their own island's direction. Lalli decided to go under cover and linger a little, just to make sure. A few minutes later, there wasn't much of a reason to doubt left anymore. He saw the short gold-haired man among the boat's occupants. They seemed to have a cat with them, but all three of them were immune and none gave any sign of being with the army. Those two things alone meant that he didn't actually have to drive the group away on sight. Another detail made them good candidates for an exception to their policy of keeping visitors off the island: one of them had hair the same color as the sheepherder's.


	3. The nameless man

**Note:** For those who would want to know in advance, there is mention of human experimentation and relatively detached approach to it on the part of both characters and narrative.

 **The nameless man**

Sigrun was ready to do what it took to speak with these people. They had supplies for three days and what was needed to catch extra food sources that could come close to their spot with minimal risk of being accused of taking food away from the island's dwellers. As they hadn't been shot upon their arrival, the plan was now to set up camp and see how long the island's dwellers took to do something about them. Just as they finished unloading the supplies, a thin young man came to meet them. With a simple nod, Emil confirmed that it was the man he had met the previous evening. The young man from the Hotakainen family exchanged a few words with Emil and Mikkel. Mikkel explained to Sigrun that Onni wanted to speak to them, but that they couldn't bring the cat into the farmstead. One of them would have to stay with the cat to make sure she didn't get near it on her own, and the Hotakainen family's envoy had decided it would be Emil. After a little consulting, they decided to agree to the meeting conditions. For all they knew, Emil was getting the position with the highest chance of escaping if the family's intentions in such a prompt meeting turned out to be far from innocent. Sigrun and Mikkel took most of what would let them prove that they were private investigators working for the family of the disappeared and not affiliated with any kind of higher authority. Emil kept a few non-essentials that would nonetheless let him continue the investigation should something happen to them.

Mikkel could now easily guess why Onni wasn't showing himself in public. Bandages were arranged as to cover the entire right half of his face and neck, which resulted in not that much of the second half being visible either. There also seemed to be bandages wrapped around his shoulder under the dark-colored tunic he was wearing. There _had_ been a fire a few years ago. Onni had probably been badly burned, and being isolated from the rest of the world for most of his life had resulted in him not getting proper treatment for the wound. Either that or it had actually been bad enough that the even the healed wound needed to be covered. Mikkel saw no sign of anyone else besides Onni and his younger cousin in the house, which meant his younger sister, and the possible fourth person living on the island, had been asked to either go into hiding or set up some kind of ambush. Mikkel was currently in favor of hiding, as Sigrun would have already given him a discrete signal if she'd considered the situation to have a high chance of being a trap. But with at least one mage on the island, they could very well be under-estimating the risks. Onni interrogated them, but was very bad at hiding that he was probably just as wary of them as they were of him. When Mikkel told him who, he, Sigrun and Emil were, and what each of them was doing in the group, he questioned every single detail of the story. Because of this, Mikkel thought it was best to be honest about the fact that their current clients all happened to be working for the Icelandic army. He next explained to Onni that even if they were part of the army, those people would be madder at him for keeping his mouth shut about something he knew about concerning their foster parents than they would be about him admitting to some kind of illegal activity. Onni, in turn, made it quite clear that he and his family _absolutely_ had to stay on the island, but that the local army would have every right to come arrest them is they got any kind of confirmation of the local's current suspicions. Before Onni told Mikkel anything, Mikkel had to promise to not share the info with anyone besides Sigrun and Emil, and only tell their clients after making sure they won't tell their superiors or any members of the Finnish army the would encounter. After Mikkel consulted with Sigrun and agreed to the terms, Onni addressed his younger cousin:  
-Lalli, get the book.  
Lalli went to a clothing box and took out what turned out to be a ledger wrapped in a bundle. He not only placed the book in front of Mikkel, but opened it to one of its early pages, that contained the names they were looking for. But Mikkel couldn't help noticing the other names on the page, and other, various notes:  
-What is this, exactly?  
Onni spoke:  
-When I was little, my grandmother thought she figured out how to stop the Rash. She lured many people into coming here so she could experiment on them. She did her experiments in the basement and her best to keep the people away from us, but we all needed to stay on the island as precaution. This ledger is one of the few things from that time that didn't get destroyed by the fire eleven years ago. Even now, it's not safe for non-immune people to come close to the house. But since it's so close to the market, our island isn't covered by travel limitations on non-immunes and might as well be the same island as far as common law is concerned. So after the fire, we decided to make sure non-immune people didn't come anywhere close ourselves. We also want to keep that ledger out of the wrong hands. We know what our grandmother did was wrong and wouldn't want anyone else doing it, but anything happening to this ledger would mean all these people and our parents have died for nothing.  
Mikkel took a few moments to take the information in. After considering a few ways to respond, he decided on starting by reassuring Onni on his understanding of what was at stake:  
-I understand. It would be a pity if someone to end up doing this all over again when they could have found out the same thing from reading this book. And even knowing what doesn't work can help find the right answer.  
Onni looked displeased:  
-Did I actually tell you my grandmother didn't find anything?

Kitty's hair suddenly started to stand on end. Emil grabbed his knife, just in case.  
-Uh… hi?  
A short woman, who bore some family resemblance to the young man who had left with Sigrun and Mikkel, emerged from behind a bush a few meters away, and slowly walked in Emil's direction.  
-I'm Tuuri, Lalli's cousin. And Onni's younger sister.  
It took Emil a few moments to realize Lalli must have been the thin young man's name. It was a nice name. He remembered that he was supposed to stay on guard and that Kitty was still on high alert. Tuuri finally seemed to notice his weapon, and presented her open palms:  
-Don't worry, I'm not dangerous. I don't have a weapon and I don't have magic like Lalli and Onni do.  
Emil still saw no reason to drop his guard:  
-The merchants told us Lalli buys supplies for _four_ people. What about that fourth person?  
Tuuri looked in the direction of the bushes from which she had emerged:  
-Ah, him? Onni and Lalli keep claiming that his magic is strange and doesn't really seem able to do anything offensive.  
According to Sigrun's stories, and Icelandic mage was still something one didn't want as an opponent. Emil dashed in the direction of the bushes, ready to make sure that whoever was hiding in there wasn't in the middle of making a rune that could be used against him or the others. But as he got behind the bush, all he met was a mess of red hair and whining:  
-I'm sorry I scared you, I wasn't going to hurt you. Onni told us to stay in the sheepfold. But it was the first time that new people were coming her since the fire and…  
He kept on speaking, but the rest of the sentence faded to the back of Emil's mind. The man's face had registered as familiar as soon as he had seen it. When his mind got around telling him where he had seen a similar face before, he was unable to focus on anything else, including the man's own words: the face staring back to Emil was a younger version of Árni Ragnarsson's. A shriek coming from where he had left Tuuri and Kitty shook him out of his daze:  
-It bit me!

The shriek resulted in all four of them dashing out of the house, towards the beach where Emil had been left with the cat. Of the four of them, Lalli was the fastest, Sigrun not very far behind. After a few moments, Mikkel realized Onni was nowhere to be seen. He looked back and noticed he was on the ground, having apparently tripped on a branch. Mikkel went to help him sit up, and quickly noticed that he looked a little dazed. He touched Onni's forehead, finding him feverish:  
-You're sick. Should I take you back to the house?  
-I know. It will go away soon, it's just having bad timing.  
Mikkel was about to ask him what, exactly, he had, he noticed red blotches on Onni's bandages. He started to get a vague idea of what Onni had been about to tell him when they had heard the shriek.

xxxx

The truth of what had happened right before the fire could be found in the last few pages of the ledger, alongside with the fact that the difference between stopping the Rash and curing the Rash wasn't simple semantics. The names of Ensi Hotakainen's own sons and daughters-in-law, listed alongside some of the later phases of the disease. Onni's listed next to the early skin-loss phase. Tuuri's, next to the phase during which the skin was changed, but still relatively solid. Lalli's name wasn't in there, as he had simply been born immune. Someone referred to as "the boy" was listed next to the almost asymptomatic incubation phase. Early enough that Kitty didn't mind him, but even more of a danger for non-immunes coming to the island than the others. Last time Mikkel had checked the room, Onni had been put to bed, Lalli had been yawning himself and Tuuri had been nursing her bitten finger, with her ear glued to the door to the room in which Sigrun and Emil were talking with the red-haired young man. According the Hotakainens, there had been attempts to give him a name after the fire had revealed his existence to them, but nothing any of them could think of had been able to stick. Since he genuinely didn't mind being addressed as "Hey you" and the like, he was still going on without a name, as he had been for the first nine years of his life. A sudden sound pulled Mikkel out of his thoughts. He looked around to see that Tuuri had left the door and was now working the loom on the other side of the room, raising yet another interrogation in his mind:  
-Don't you risk making people sick by bartering with that cloth?  
-Lalli decontaminates it with a spell before taking it to the market. What are you going to tell his… um…  
-I guess they are his foster siblings. I promised your brother to not tell them anything before making sure they won't tell the wrong people. Telling them about him will probably enhance the chances that they _actually_ keep their mouths shut. But they are all immune, so they can come here without any danger to their lives if they wish to meet him. One of his sisters is a mage, so she may be able to visit him by other means.  
-And what are we to him? From the outside world's perspective, I mean. He's kind of our prisoner in a way, isn't he?  
-This is you putting word in other people's mouths. We'll never know of the exact words they have for you until we actually tell them about you.  
Sigrun chose that exact moment to come out of the other room and speak words only Mikkel and Emil could understand:  
-Nothing particularly worrying came up, aside from the whole walking infection vector thing. Let's go back home and tell the sibs about him.

xxxx

Emil and his friends had come in the early morning, while he was already tired out by his scouting round and left while he was sleeping. As all four of them were having dinner, Lalli found out that they had come from very far away to look for the sheepherder's parents and were now on the way back there. That meant it was probably best for him to forget about Emil. He could still go to the market and ask the questions he had to one of the local men who seemed attractive to him. At the end of the meal, Onni gave Lalli a folded piece of paper, telling him it was from Emil. Lalli read it immediately. It said that Emil was going to come back with whatever items the sheepherder's family wished to send him. He was also seriously considering making that trip a one-way one, and moving into the house to help Lalli in the tasks that required an immune person. To not impose himself, however, he was going do so only if every single member of the household approved of it.  
-Neither of the two others mind. It's your call, and I'll personally tell him to not stay more than a few days if you don't want him living here. If you don't mind either, we better start figuring out where we are going to put him.


	4. Meeting

**Meeting**

Bjarni could see the bustling market on the island his and Emil's boat was approaching. This was the market from which the grandchildren of the woman who had abducted his foster parents were getting their supplies. His foster parents had gone on the trip not realizing his mother was pregnant; she had been, after all, old enough that some of the usual tell-tale signs of a pregnancy could happen for another reason entirely. The pregnancy had been eventually discovered due to one of its own complications, that made it dangerous for his mother to try travelling back to Iceland before having the baby. The last letter Bjarni and his siblings had gotten from their parents mentioned that they had heard of a gifted magical healer living not very far away from the place in which they had settled to see the pregnancy to term, and that they were going to try seeing her. Bjarni now knew that the woman had isolated herself and her family on a small island a few months before his foster parents had come to look for her, and had been in need of people on whom to experiment. For reasons nobody had been able to pinpoint, the woman had spared the baby, to the point of making him a last-resort experimentation subject alongside her own non-immune family members. He'd never gotten a proper name, but that had one positive aspect: it had left that particular spot open for the name their parents would have most likely given him. Hildur had already told him what it was during her mage-plane visit to him, but Bjarni would be the would the one to test whether it had actually caught on.

Within a minute of the two of them setting foot on the island, a small crowd surrounded Emil, asking him various questions. Emil either answered or dodged them best that he could and gave Bjarni an idea of what he was to expect after coming back alive and well from the Hotakainen island himself. This only made him even more baffled as to the reason Emil had decided to move into their home as an extra pair of hands. On the subject of hands, Bjarni noticed a thin one emerging from the crowd and touching the exact spot of the knit-wool hat that Emil was wearing that Bjarni knew to be covering still re-growing hair. The people in the crowd who noticed the hand almost instinctively stepped away from its owner, who hardly seemed to acknowledge it. Emil's initial reaction was surprise, but it his face turned into a big smile the second he laid eyes on the hand's owner:  
-Hi Lalli. Don't worry about it, it's healing fine. I think it's okay for you to take your hand away now.  
Lalli took his hand away from Emil's head, then started looking around him:  
-I thought you were supposed to come with… someone else.  
Emil pointed to Bjarni:  
-He's here.  
Lalli looked at Bjarni and raised his eyebrows:  
-You don't look like… what I expected.  
Bjarni could see the young man's point, considering his own black hair in addition to probably having a face that was nothing like his brother's. Lalli turned his back to Bjarni and Emil, and started walking:  
-My boat is this way. It's big enough for the three of us and all your things.

On the way to the island, Bjarni started to get a glimpse of Emil's motivations. Despite the awkwardness of the conversation on both sides and his rather dodgy Finnish, Bjarni was able to pick up that Emil and Lalli had taken an interest in each other at the time they had met, but circumstances had kept them from actually spending any kind of time with each other. Just how little they had been able to speak became obvious to Bjarni as he was watching them finding out new things about each other about every one or two lines. As they got closer to the smaller island, Bjarni noticed a short figure sharing Lalli's hair color emerging from a woody patch and coming to wait for them on the harbor. As they disembarked, the young woman introduced herself as Reynir's wife Tuuri in Icelandic that was about as good as Bjarni's Finnish. He was about to ask how she had learned Icelandic, when he remembered Emil mentioning that Lalli had been buying a Finnish-Icelandic dictionary when he first met him. Tuuri grabbed Bjarni's arm:  
-Come see Reynir at the farm.  
Bjarni didn't have time to point out that they would be leaving Emil and Lalli alone with the bags before getting literally dragged into the woods by Tuuri. Soon enough, she had taken him to a sheep pen with a small sheepfold not far from it. In the pen, a red-haired figure sporting a long braid bearing a more than passing resemblance to Bjarni's foster father was examining the sheep. Hildur had already told Bjarni about the fact that he was tending to the sheep on the island, but actually seeing this brought back memories of the farm that had needed to be handed over to a neighbor a few years after their parents had gone missing in addition to the feelings brought in by actually meeting his younger brother. Reynir finished his work and came to greet Bjarni in broken Icelandic similar to Tuuri's, then gave Bjarni a hug. Bjarni hugged him back, letting tears out of his eyes.

xxxx

Once the initial onslaught of emotion had passed, Bjarni's top priority had been to do something about Reynir and Tuuri's awful pronunciation in Icelandic, and they apparently had the same idea about Bjarni's Finnish. That resulted in the three of them pronouncing random words for each other while Onni was already putting Emil to work by having him make dinner and Lalli was having cat nap. If it weren't for the bandages covering Onni's face and Tuuri regularly failing resist scratching her left shoulder, Bjarni could have forgotten the reason the place was probably the only one in which Reynir could have somewhat of a happy life. The world outside the island couldn't even start to understand the implications of an incubation phase lasting for years, and Bjarni wasn't completely sure _he_ understood himself. Reynir looked perfectly fine, at worst starting to come down with a cold without noticing. Bjarni didn't even want to start imagining what could happen if some random villager saw him from afar, noticed that obvious tell-tale sign that he was out of place and got the idea of rescuing him. This, ironically, effectively caused Reynir's status to be closer to that of a prisoner of the family than what Onni and the others wished it to be.

xxxx

Bjarni wasn't going to lie to himself. The fact that the little brother he had never known was "technically married" with the only woman among the surviving grandchildren of the woman who had abducted his foster parents had worried him a little. The bed that had been given to him was in the same room as the one Reynir and Tuuri were using. Bjarni had fallen asleep much earlier than he intended to, tired out by the trip, only to wake up to the two of them snuggling, still sound asleep. As for the interactions between them he had seen the previous evening, he'd seen far, far worse between people who were in arranged marriages, some of which were due to having a number of options not that much bigger than what those two had had. Bjarni realized he probably wasn't going to go back to sleep, and decided to get up and go to the house's main room.

-… gives you any trouble about this, tell me about it and I'll have a word with them, okay?  
A little peek inside the room told Bjarni that Emil was already awake and that Lalli was back from his nocturnal scouting round. Both had turned their attention to him as soon as they had noticed him starting to open the door.  
-Uh… sorry. I can come back later if you want to talk to each other some more.  
Lalli answered:  
-You can come in, I already know everything I need to.  
Emil looked a little disappointed for a few moments, then decided that he might as well start breakfast now that three of them were already up. The bustling soon woke the rest of the household up. Onni came into the main room quickly enough, but Reynir and Tuuri took their time. During the meal Bjarni couldn't help noticing that Onni kept glancing in Lalli's general direction. Once breakfast was done and Onni's bandages were changed, Bjarni went to tend the sheep with Reynir and help him with various chores.

xxxx

Bjarni had been back to work for a couple months, and almost forgotten about the early morning conversation between Emil and Lalli he had interrupted while visiting Reynir, when got the news via a letter from Hildur. Reynir and Tuuri were now apparently fighting over the few private spots on the island with Emil and Lalli.

Sigrun wished that just once, she could tell people of that small island in outer Saimaa, and stop having to pretend that the misdirected letters had been their most surprising case so far. Mikkel kept telling her they would probably eventually run into something even more interesting they could tell people about. Unfortunately, between the rumor that she and Mikkel had been able to escape the Hotakainen island only by abandoning Emil there and the real reason Emil was now living there, it was going be very hard to find a better story.


End file.
